Andy’s organizing system creates a “2014 Omnibus” in an application called Scrivener. The program is intended for use by professional writers and is immensely helpful when working on a large writing project that requires research, organization, revisions, and more. It can be used by anyone, though, who has writing as part of his or her job — briefs, reports, studies, analyses, website posts, tweets, etc. I used it to write my books and occasionally use it when I’m working on especially demanding articles. Thanks to Andy’s suggestion, I now also use it to store and catalog my writing.

Scrivener lets you organize your work into projects. A project can be broken down into chapters, revisions, and whatever else you utilize during your writing process. Further, you can use folders to group these features together as you like. To set up my “2014 Caolo Omnibus,” I followed these steps:

Create a new blank project called “2014 Caolo Omnibus.”

Create 12 folders, January through December

Make several labels, I used ones such as “Unclutterer,” “TUAW,” and “Guest Posts.”

Add articles into the appropriate folders with the appropriate labels.

The next step is to create a backup. I tell Scrivener to save my project to a folder in Dropbox, so if something happens to my computer, I still have an online copy. The software also has several export options, should I want to get my work into another format. Finally, I can see how many words I’ve written at a glance (I’m at just over 89,000 words in 2014 so far).

Scrivener is Mac-only, but this trick would work just as well in the platform-agnostic Evernote system. When your work is to create something ethereal, like words on a screen, it can feel like you’ve got nothing to show for your efforts at the end of the day. This practice doesn’t solve that exactly, but it almost gives you the sensation that your work is tangible. Also, if I wanted to find highlight pieces for a portfolio, this setup makes that much easier.

Two things to keep in mind: Scrivener is available for Windows (already mentioned) and depending upon your source-material needs, the packet file that scrivener creates can be quite large. I ran into a project where there were many audio interviews in mp3 format, and they’re included in the packet, so it made the file sizes too large to practically back up immediately to Dropbox. But on principle, I totally agree with this process.